1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a method, apparatus, and storage media for image processing.
2. Background of the Invention
A mosaic technique is known which generates a mosaic image by combining, like tiles, material images. The color of each part of the resulting mosaic image is represented by that of each material image. A vast amount of processing time and memory is required for calculating the average density of a mosaic image if the resolution of its original image or material image is high or the size of the original image is very large in generating images using a mosaic technique. Furthermore, a large amount of time is required to transform an image into a desired size during positioning.
In a network system to which a remote server for generating mosaic images is connected, if a client requests the remote server to generate a mosaic image using material images contained in the client, the client must send them to the server. The client cannot prevent a possible unauthorized use of the material images sent to the server.
Because a mosaic image is created by combining material images, the resulting mosaic image redundantly contains images contained in those material images. Thus, a large amount of storage area is required to contain the mosaic image.